I have not deliberately been out of touch. I have not deliberately sent you to Coventry. I have not had my hands tied behind my back since December, but neither have I written anything here since then.

Next Thursday will be our six month anniversary of moving into the Temple, and in that time my energy has been focussed on the community here, on the people that live within these walls (seven of us, now) and the many people that pass through, rather than on the community out there.

I recently finished reading Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking, and I was impressed by how wonderful she is at creating a community, and how much this is  to do with communicating, how trusting she is of her community, and how powerful asking for help can be.

The temple is taking on a life of its own. It has always been bigger than me, and bigger than me and Satya,  but it that is much more obvious as the energies of other people and of the group take us into lovely and sometimes unexpected directions, like the garden transformation, the Quiz night and Adam’s monthly discussion group.

As the project grows it has become obvious that Satya and I need to ask for help more, instead of imagining that we can manage the whole kit and caboodle, and not only manage it but do all the work ourselves too. We’re getting better at this, Amanda’s book helped (I feel like I can call her Amanda, now that she very nearly stayed the night here) and the house-mates and wider community are stepping up and taking on more as the temple life grows around them.

I also need to get better at speaking to the outside world, I want you all to be part of the Amida Mandala community, but there’s no community without communication.

So I’ve set that intention – let’s see how I do.

In the last six months

• My teacher Dharmavidya has led a retreat here.
• We have had the roof repaired, and a new 40% more efficient boiler fitted.
• I have dug a small veg. patch and the runner beans, potatoes, courgettes and kale are in the ground. There’s more turf to lift and soil to turn over, and the leek seedlings are nearly ready to be planted.
• Ron has helped us take down lots of Leylandii
• We have gone from three house mates (temple mates?) to four, to five.
• I have just started playing my ukulele again
• Satya and I are halfway through writing an introduction to Pureland Buddhism….

I could go on but that gives you some idea of life here. The Quiz is on Friday (we are raising money for a meditation hut), and on Sunday we have a gardening day. Today I am supposed to be writing more of that book – I’d better get back to it.

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday morning as I was getting into the car, a harried looking nurse ran down our garden path, opened our door and called into the house. A few moments later I heard her apologising to Satya for getting the wrong address.

By the time I had started the engine she was back in her own car and driving down the road. I passed her a little later, pulled up in front of another house.

This afternoon as I was pulling up weeds in the front garden I noticed a hearse passing. It parked up further down the street. It had stopped in the same place the nurse had stopped yesterday. Two suited men got out, with serious expressions and black ties. I watched them getting an empty stretcher out of the hearse.

It’s possible, but unlikely, that these two events are unconnected. When the hearse passed I was already thinking about tidying up the gardening tools and getting a cup of tea. I didn’t wait around to see if the two smart men brought a body back out of the house with them.

This morning Satya gave a talk on A Buddhist Approach to Following Your Dreams. She talked about which dreams come from the Ego, and which are more selfless, how we can tune into our dreams and what the risks and rewards are of following them.

In the discussion afterwards we talked about broken dreams: what is it like when you have a vision in mind and suddenly it is taken away? Sometimes we let our dreams die and sometimes we try and keep them alive beyond their natural lifespan.

A few weeks ago I thought there was a reasonable chance that the building I had begun dreaming about would be taken away from me.

The Trust that supports our Buddhist group is in the process of buying a wonderful building for Satya and me to run as a temple here in Malvern, and for a little while I thought the whole thing was at risk of falling through.

Any house purchase has a whole host of things which are outside of the control of a single person. I remember the stress of buying our current home: there were phone calls every day to make sure other people were doing the jobs they were supposed to be doing. With this deal it’s not even me buying the building I have set my heart upon; I’m even less in control.

When it looked like the deal was at risk I must have been disappointed at some level, although I think I would have appeared pretty pragmatic if you’d spoken to me at the time. I suspect I pushed all those worried feelings deep down inside somewhere. Occasionally they would slip out in a few sharp words but mostly they kept themselves pretty hidden.

It was only the great sense of relief I felt when the deal was back on that clued me in to what level of feeling I’d been keeping at bay.  It was also at that point I accepted the project was really going ahead, and not just something that I would like to happen. I began to get excited about moving and then suddenly I was surprised by grief.

After our offer was accepted on the new place, dark dreams disturbed my sleep for a couple of nights. In the wee small hours of the morning I woke up in tears.

I traced back my thoughts into my dreams and I realised that I was grieving for futures that could no longer be, now that I was committing my life to running the temple.

Theatre director Anne Bogart has said that every creative act is a violent one. Even the simple act of placing a chair in place on a stage destroys all the other possibilities for where that chair might be.

I’m not even sure what those old dreams were: the last wisps of the teenage fantasy of being a rock star, perhaps, or my dreams of going back into the theatre myself. There is still time for those things of course, but not in the magical way of my most grandiose of dreams.

Every now and again I catch myself fantasising about life in the new place. My ego works hard to create visions of being there in a way in which I can be up on a pedestal and life is easy. I try to give those dreams up as soon as I spot them.

If I didn’t want to grieve for those unlived futures I could have tried to keep the dreams alive. I could have turned them over in my mind in the quiet spaces of the day and allowed them to infect my sleep too.

Down that path leads madness: resentment of the gap between my lived life and the dream world and a lack of gratitude for the amazing dream that is being realised.

Just like our physical being, every dream has a natural lifespan.

Recently I met the death of some of my dreams, and it was good.

I don’t know who lives at the house the hearse stopped in front of this morning, but I hope that whoever lived there  lived well, I hope that those that were close to them can grieve well, and that new good dreams will flourish.

The bass rolled across the dance floor and into my chest. I could feel it through the floor, and the wall behind me. The dance floor was surrounded by young people.

We were at the festival of colours in Birmingham; a celebration of street art. We were in a small bar in the middle of the old Custard Factory. We had gone there expecting a beat-boxing completion, but when we squeezed through the crowd at the door we encountered an empty dance floor. On the stage behind an MC was mixing and sending out tunes. We hunkered down in one corner of the room and waited to see what was going to happen.

For the next hour or so people took it in turns to step on to the rolled out square of  vinyl  that was the dance floor and break dance. There were some stunning performances. As we sat watching I noticed that I preferred some dancers over others. I began to wonder what it was that made the difference between a good performance and a great one.

Years ago I studied performance as part of my Drama degree. One of the definitions we used then was that performance happened when someone was working on stage. What attracts an audience is seeing effort applied, particularly effort that takes the performer to their own learning edge. This is when the performance, whatever it is, comes alive.

That gave me part of the answer. All of the dancers were working hard. They were working hard physically and in some cases you could feel their mental concentration too; their focus on each of the moves individually (how to keep your balance in a float, or a flare) and even in which sequence of moves to perform.

Another part of the answer came from some of the reading I’ve been doing recently.

A couple of weeks ago I found my old copy of Robert Pirsig’s Lila on a shelf in the flat in India, covered in an inch of dust. I cleaned it up and brought it home with me. In Lila Pirsig takes his previously undefined ‘quality’ and divides it into static quality and Dynamic quality. (Pirsig always capitalised ‘Dynamic’ but not ‘static’.)

I’ve also been reading about Chaos theory recently and found some parallels there with Pirsig’s work. Systems with what Pirsig calls static quality are what chaos theory might call ordered systems, patterns which repeat and copy themselves – like certain social mores that are passed down unchanged through the generations. Dynamic quality is the value that comes from patterns on the edge of chaos: ideas or physical systems that, instead of repeating without changing, are developing in unpredictable ways – often to bring themselves into a higher value relationship with their environment.

The dancers I preferred were the ones with the most Dynamic quality.

The first break dancer was a young man in shorts and a t-shirt. He looked strong; I could see the definition of his abs and his calves, and his veins standing out as he strained in the physically difficult moves. He reminded me of the acrobats doing floor work I had seen on TV during the Olympics.  He certainly ticked the box for working hard on stage.

Despite all of this there was something missing from the dance. I didn’t realise what it was until I saw the next person enter the space and start to move.

Like George Gershwin, he had rhythm.

The first dancer hadn’t treated the music any differently to how he’d treated the walls of the bar. It was there behind the dance but he didn’t notice it or react to it. The dance and the music were separate and bound never to meet.

The second dancer was less acrobatic but the music became his partner in the dance. His moves bounced off the beat; he slid in and around the melody. It was like the MC had stepped on the floor and was dancing too.

This was the real stuff. Here was a dancer working hard and also displaying Pirsig’s Dynamic quality. When the music changed the dance changed with it.

Maybe that’s just a really long way of saying I preferred the dancer who was tuned into the music, and not just going through his best set of moves, but I think there’s more to it than that.

Or at least I think there are some lessons here for how I live my own life. Life isn’t a performance but the most exciting moments are those which include Dynamic quality – when we put ourselves in relationship to something outside ourselves and let ourselves, our performances and our projects, be changed and affected by those influences.

When we are first learning to dance, or to write poetry, or any new skill, we have to learn the static patterns first. How to hold a brush and make a stroke, how to gauge the metre of a line of verse, or to cha-cha-cha.

The kind of art and the moments in life which stop us in our tracks are those which go beyond the usual and take us to the edge of something new. They are the moments in which we dance in relationship to music that comes from somewhere other than the simple patterns we have inherited. We are inspired by a muse and use what we have learnt, those static building blocks, in the creation of something new.

Break dancing is outside of my usual culture. I don’t spend my time practicing spinning on my head or perfecting the worm. I read ‘b-boy’ competition on the events programme and was expecting beatboxers not break dancers.  I’m glad that I was surprised though – this too is Dynaimc quality at work. It took me out of my usual world, exposed me to something new, and changed me.

 

In medieval Japan one of the main reasons for practicing Pureland Buddhism was to have a good death. When I’m writing leaflets or emails about the Pureland Buddhist group I run here in Malvern I don’t mention death at all. Most of the people who come through the door of the shrine room aren’t looking for a good death; they are looking for other things.

This morning I sent out an email advertising a new set of mindfulness meditation classes. I didn’t mention death there either.

The sales pitch for Buddhism, and for the mindfulness classes I teach, is all about a good life: slow down, create space, and find peace.

I’ve had a few encounters with death recently, one literary, one physical and another via someone else’s grief.

For the past week or so I’ve been reading Thomas Lynch’s The Undertaking. It’s a beautiful little book of prose from a poet and funeral director. Some of my great uncles were in the same trade, or at least used to provide a dressed up horse and carriage for the final journey of a number of lifeless Welsh bodies, thirty or so years ago. I have often thought if I wasn’t a Buddhist priest I might have become an undertaker. Lynch writes about taking care of the dead and the grieving with a tenderness that goes beyond the merely professional.  There is something of the Bodhisattva spirit in the attention he gives to the living, in the presence of death. The Undertaking reminds me that at the end of every life comes death, and that how we treat the dead and dying is a good measure of how we treat the living.

I’m not sure we treat the dying and the dead very well at all, these days. This afternoon I watched Big Fish for the first time. At the end of the film (don’t read the next few words if you haven’t seen it yet) the son of a dying man asks his mother, “How long has he got?”

“We don’t talk about that yet.” She tells him.

A couple of days ago someone drove their car into the back of mine. Not so much impact that either of us were hurt, but enough that I suspect their car will be written off.

I was slowing down, the car in front had slowed and stopped and was turning off the road. I glanced in my rear view mirror and could see the car behind was going too fast. My first instinct was to stop braking and create more distance between me and the car behind. My second instinct was to brake again;  I didn’t want to hit the car in front. I tried to brake just enough to stop before hitting the car in front, but not so hard that the impact from behind was made worse. That whole process took less time than it has taken me to write out these few sentences.

My back is still a little sore but it is the reminder of how close death might be that leaves the deeper mark. I have been to plenty of family funerals, sometimes for people who died relativity young (I was going to write, ‘who died too young’, but death’s scythe cares less about age than we do) and as a Buddhist priest I have been called to sit with the dying in Hospital. In all of these previous encounters I never saw my own mortality reflected back at me so clearly as I do now.

Thomas Lynch writes that when he was a young man he wanted to know how long his life would be, and created a formula. If you can recognise the middle of your life, he thought, just double that and you’ll reach the end point. What are the signs of this middle part of life? Being satisfied in where you are, noticing that the mind turns back to the past as often as it turns to the future, and perhaps a new awareness of mortality. I think I can tick the first and third of those boxes at the moment; with a new project on the horizon my mind is still turning more towards the future than the past. Although Lynch’s theory has a certain poetic beauty, I am not sure that death will pay much attention to it at all.

My third recent encounter with death was in Delhi. The son of a friend there was killed recently. I only managed to get a few moments alone with the bereaved father. We hugged and in that communication I understood as much as if we’d talked for hours.

In medieval Japan the point of a good death was to ensure a good rebirth. In a culture where being born into the right family made all the difference, where only men from the right families could become monks (mistakenly thought to be a pre-requisite for enlightenment) I can understand wanting to make sure you end up in the right place next time around.

Most of the people I speak to here in the UK don’t put much stock in the idea of rebirth, but that’s no reason to throw the idea of a good death away too.

Keeping the great leveler in mind can bring a tenderness to all of our interactions. Not only because it reminds us that everyone is carrying their own griefs, but also because it reminds us that time is limited: each moment of this life is unrepeatable.  Most of the beauty we encounter in this life is like the famous cherry blossom in Kyoto: it comes and then it goes.

What lasts beyond death is the spirit of things.  Hundreds of years ago the Japanese believed that the spirit in which you lived your last few moments made a big difference to where you next life would be. Each moment we live is like this. Live well now, live with love, and where you go tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, will be led by love.

Live well now and you will head towards a good death.

I think this is a formula that works both ways. Aim for a good death, and you will live well now.

 

 

 

…and everything seems translucent.

We think of our worlds as solid, but spending a week in a completely different culture reminds me of how provisional all of this is. The things we lean on are ghosts that we take to be real.

It’s late, but something is keeping me awake. Could be the small can of Coca Cola that I drank earlier, with CONTAINS CAFFINE stamped on the side? It’s possible, I’ve been off caffine for long enough that a regular cup of tea gives me a sleepless night.

The Coca Cola was given to me in the house of an old friend of Sahisnu’s; Rana Gupta. Their house was above a shop and was one of the nicest that I have been into in any of my trips to Delhi. I know there are much nicer houses that this one, but I’m used to living in the slums and this felt like a place in comparison. Marble floors, the biggest TV I have seen in a long time, and wallpaper – something I’ve never seen in an Indian home before.

I’m wondering what I have learnt about myself since I have been here.

I learn about myself in specific moments. This morning I thought I was being invited to talk at a school and my first response was resentment. I had got used to the idea that my last two days would be quieter and was even looking forward to that quite space (despite being frustrated earlier this week, in the spaces where there was less to do). It didn’t take long for me to convince myself that I could enjoy giving a talk, the school was an hour away and they wanted something on basic Buddhism… I could provide that, I thought, and it would be a good thing to do, dharmic work, even if it’s not directly supporting the Amida Buddhists here.

Of course once I was looking forward to it I realised that I hadn’t been invited at all. Suvidya had simply been telling me about something he would be doing in a few week’s time, once I have gone.

These specific moments give rise to more general learning. This one takes me back to the dream I had before coming out here: let go of your expectations.

I have learnt that I only feel competent in so many ways in the UK because I am embedded in systems which I understand and which support me. Here in India freed from those systems I sometimes feel under resourced and suddenly grateful for everything that holds my competence at home.

And of course, I am reminded of how provisional the life I have is. That if a just one or two conditions had been slightly different I might be living in poverty or in a society that is organised along completely different lines and with completely different assumptions to the one I usually call home.